Leave ‘Martyrdom’ to the Jihadists

By Paul Vallely

July 28, 2016

“Santo subito.” The Italian words mean “make him a saint now.” This was the cry of the crowds at the funeral of Pope John Paul II — a demand swiftly acted upon by the church authorities in Rome. The words are echoing around the world again now. This time, the call comes from Catholics shocked at the death of the Rev. Jacques Hamel, the priest whose throat was cut as he officiated at morning prayers on Tuesday in a small French town near Rouen.

The demand to put the slain French priest on the fast track for sainthood was made by a prominent Italian politician, Roberto Maroni, the president of the Lombardy region. It spread swiftly across the globe on social media as Catholics, and others, expressed their shock at the slaying of the priest. “Father Jacques is a martyr of faith,” Mr. Maroni proclaimed, and the pope should “immediately proclaim him St. Jacques.” The sentiment was echoed by a senior official in the Vatican press office who hailed the 85-year-old priest as a “modern-day martyr.”

Such calls to canonize the murdered priest are ill advised. They will only play into the hands of the extremists.

The reaction articulates a new level of revulsion at this latest act of terrorism, which the Islamic State has claimed as the work of two of its “soldiers.” The militant group has repeatedly shown a perverse determination to find new ways to shock. With the death of a priest at the altar of a church, it plumbed what one cardinal this week called “another layer of depravity.”

The altar, for Catholics, is where the priest daily commemorates the self-sacrifice of Christ’s surrender to a brutal death on the cross. It is, as Pope Francis said, “the sacred place in which the love of God is announced.” Not since pagan times have altars been associated with the spilling of human blood. The altar also stands in the part of the church known as the sanctuary, a word that has since early medieval times denoted a place of sacred safety.

The demand for Pope Francis to declare Father Hamel an official martyr of the Catholic Church is understandable, and he fulfills the traditional criteria. He was killed, according to the church’s Latin definition, “in odium fidei,” meaning “in hatred of the faith.” A witness said his killers shouted “Allahu akbar!” as they entered the church and, at his murder, recorded “a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic.”

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A memorial to the Rev. Jacques Hamel in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray, France, this week.CreditFrancois Mori/Associated Press

Some leading Catholics immediately compared Father Hamel to Thomas Becket or Oscar Romero, other priests killed in their places of worship. But there are important differences. Fathers Becket and Romero knew the dangers they were facing, taking a stand against the civil powers of their day. Their martyrdoms were ones of defiance.

By contrast, Father Hamel was going about his lifelong business in St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray as an everyday exemplar of quiet holiness, kindness and love for the people in his community. That devotion was not confined to serving other Catholics: A local imam, Mohammed Karabila, paid warm tribute to the priest for his role in promoting interfaith dialogue. The town’s mosque was built on land donated by Catholics to the Muslim community.

For France, even after the deadly mass attacks in Nice and Paris, this outrage crosses a new terrorist frontier. Violent jihadists have now exported to the West tactics they have long used against Christians and other religious minorities in countries like Syria, Iraq and Pakistan. An attack in a church in a small town in Normandy suggests that the extremists want to make us feel that no one and nowhere is safe, that we are all on the front line if terrorism can come to our very doorstep.

Some will react to that threat by unwittingly accepting the terrorists’ agenda, as the archbishop of Rouen appeared to do when he described the killing of Father Hamel as an “assassination” — as though a provincial priest would be a target. But others reject the Islamic State narrative. “This is not a war of religions,” said a Parisian churchgoer. “It’s not a Muslim who killed a Catholic. It is simply evil.”

Father Hamel may be a martyr in the eyes of the church, but his attackers are also martyrs in the eyes of jihadists. There is, of course, an egregious false equivalence between the two cases: One man is a pure victim, while the others were killers who contrived to die at the hands of French law enforcers.

We must strengthen our defenses against terrorism but we must resist the notion that a fundamental clash of civilizations is the issue. The real problem is the pathology of a perverse minority of extremists with distorted notions of holy war and martyrdom. Pope Francis was right to speak of the “absurd violence” of Father Hamel’s death and to describe the “senseless hatred” of the massacre in Nice.

Reciprocal talk of martyrdom is unhelpful. The impulse to canonize Father Hamel, however sincere and well intentioned, feeds the idea of retaliation — our martyr for yours — that gives the jihadists the war of religions they seek. As to sainthood, let history judge rather than us making it a proxy for a political response.

Paul Vallely is a visiting professor in public ethics at the University of Chester, England, and the author of “Pope Francis — the Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism.”